Hi! I'm Marilyn Sambhavi Polo, an East-Coaster who has happily made Oregon home for 6 years.

For 20 years, I have practiced, studied, and taught meditation, yoga, and Ayurveda. I am a Sivananda Yoga trained instructor and lived on their ashrams around the world, serving as a karma yogi and assisting in teacher trainings.

Professionally, I teach 4th grade at a Corvallis bilingual school, and in a career, I was an academic researcher of psychology & psychiatry. I've taught my 4th graders mindfulness meditation daily and yoga weekly for 3 years and am eager to share my enthusiasm and practical approach to developing a daily meditation practice with the Live Well community.

My years of living in the bustle of New York City, maintaining a very demanding career, trying to nurture my personal life all while trying to sustain a yoga practice have offered me unique insights to building and growing a personal practice that is meaningful to the individual. I invite you all to join the course. Feel free to message me with any questions. I hope to see you there! Peace.

Resiliency Yoga with Angela Grace

I am so excited to offer this weekly class as part of a yoga program I'm calling Resiliency Yoga.

Resiliency Yoga is the natural outcome of my studies with the NeuroMeditation Institute and of current pain science.

Each weekly class will include gentle movement, calming breathwork, and meditation.

Here's the twist...all the techniques we practice will either be Quiet Mind or Mindfulness practices. As defined by the NeuroMeditation Institute, both Quiet Mind and Mindfulness practices illicit slow brain wave patterns.

I chose the name of this program very intentionally. Dictionary.com defines resiliency as the power or ability to return to the original form...after being bent, compressed, or stretched. It is also defined as the ability to recover readily from illness, depression, adversity, or the like; buoyancy.

Any manner of trauma such as persistent pain, health issues, grief, anxiety, or prolonged stress restrict your nervous system's capacity to navigate everyday life. They diminish your resiliency, but don't despair. You can rebuild your vitality.

It works like this. Trauma increases your nervous system's threat sensitivity. Once your physiology has dealt with a trauma, it remembers. Your nervous system resets to detect threats more easily and activate your emergency systems more rapidly. It's the once bitten, twice shy philosophy in action.

This becomes a problem when your nervous system readjusts to make a heightened state of arousal the new normal. When this happens, your nervous system reacts to non-threatening physical sensations and environmental circumstances as if there were an emergency.

Quiet Mind and Mindfulness practices produce an increase in alpha and theta brain waves respectively. The slower brain waves shift your nervous system to a calmer state allowing you to rest and recover, allowing you to nurture your resiliency.